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Bellies of Power's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Pregnancy Content | #7 | 3.800 | 3.800 |
| Jam Theme | #13 | 3.200 | 3.200 |
| Creativity | #15 | 3.400 | 3.400 |
| Overall | #15 | 3.050 | 3.050 |
| Gameplay | #24 | 1.800 | 1.800 |
Ranked from 5 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Judge feedback
Judge feedback is anonymous and shown in a random order.
- I liked the concept and really hope to see this game further developed.
- I really like the concept of gameplay in this game. A balance of gestating various creatures while battling and upgrading. You start small with easy ways to become pregnant and then work your way up with more difficult methods. I'll admit I was and still am struggling to figure out the balance to the system given you only have 12 months of time yet many gestations are short. Gives you the feeling that you have to sort of wait to gain as much for the 12 month mark. With that in mind, I really stuggled to find long gestations at the start and then work my way to lower ones at the end, sort of going in the opposite loop of what you would think. I would recommend possibly removing the 12 month limit and then let the player figure out a balance of pregnancies when moving into the trials. Outside of that I do feel the stong points in this game is the focus on pregnancy content and the jam theme. The entire class of the character and aspects of the game focus on impregnantion, pregnancy, and birth. You progress though these cycles as your character becomes stronger and learn how to become a better preggomancer. Overall good game concept, would like to see the time limit taken off and let the player experiment with builds or perhaps have certain preg builds that could be used for certain trials as they learn their class.
- Not really my cup of tea (not much into the whole "breed with everything that moves (and some things that don't)" subgenre), but it works quite well and there is even some challenge to it, even though it's clearly not complete. The sizes were nice, as was the planning for what you wanted and how you would pass the tests. Balancing was iffy, but that is to be expected for a jam game, so I don't want to be too harsh on it. All in all, I'm sure this will make a lot of people happy once it progresses a bit further in development!
- Great job on the artwork for this game Caer! I liked how the amount of babies and species in the womb tied into how pregnant the MC looked. While relatively short, BoP was easy to replay to try and get a larger size and to explore more of the talks between the MC and other races. I enjoyed it!
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Comments
So I do like the idea of the game were each baby you have give you a different power meaning that you can customs you character the way you like but you can feel were you have to cut so things time because the loop there just needs to be fix up so the game flows better and have a better ending in fact I do feel like if you work on after jam it will be a great game just now it feel like half way finish.
Great game, loved the pregression art and the general feel of the game. I think the scope was perfect and combat was pretty good. A couple comments I have are that I wish there was a bit more variability in gestation times amongst the different races as it would've made it a bit easier to decide when to interact with each one. Also is there a CG for when the MC is "massive" cause I don't think there was a change from "very big."
HI, thank you for the kind words. Very encouraging, as I had heavy doubts about balancing combat and keeping the game concise. Also, you made the artist super happy.
There are only 4 preg stages at the moment, due real life complications limiting the artist's availability. The current biggest size is much more modest than the usual in the niche, but the game refused to render the pregression properly whenever I tested it, and I still haven't figured out why. Without having found a fix for that, we didn't make more art assets for it.
So, this is currently the biggest size we have art for:
For variety in gestation time, I agree. I ran into a couple of issues though, which may be entirely in my head, or very likely due my inexperience in game dev (this IS the first real game I ever made).
Making them too long makes baby management meaningless. Making them too short risks losing important skills too early AND makes growing the MC more difficult. Skill variety is tied to amount of babies, but skill power is tied to gestation lenght - the longer a baby is inside, the stronger the skill it gives with exceptions).
Without an elegant way to keep track of gestations, or a decent way to mitigate losing the stats/skills from giving birth, I opted to make most gestations similar and more on the longer side.
Now that the jam is over, I have thought of a couple of ways to get around a few of these issues. I'm still gathering my thoughts and pondering what to change, but I believe I'll make the game longer, probably 16 months or up to 20 months - should be long enough to allow seeing the all the birth scenes and plan better.
I'll probably spend some time toying with plugins first and get the skill shop working instead of trying complicated solutions.
Ya that makes a lot of sense given the constraints and nice to hear about the plans going forward. And ya the artist did a great job! Definitely seems like there’s a lot of room for the game to grow and get even better, I wish you guys luck.
Fun game, second test feels unfair tbh.
Thanks, glad you found it fun.
Did you beat the second test? How unfair you felt it was compared to the other two?
I beat them and I'd say that the second one was a bit rougher than the others, the main annoyance being her massive health pool and 1500 heal. Lactobacillus (which is a name I was not expecting to see here lol) hit hard but at least I could 2 shot him.
Lactobacyllus helps you stay healthy~.
Lactobacyllus has 3k hp, the lactomancer has 10k. She has much more health than him, because she's actually using the third examiner's HP stat instead of the her own...oops. My bad!